The German writer Antje Rávik Strubel was born, 15 years before the Berlin Wall fell, in Potsdam, in the former GDR, a biographical detail that has marked her literary career. Her latest work, Blue Woman (De Conatus), is a political novel that tells the drama of a young Czech woman who, after suffering a sexual assault in Germany, faces an “unequal and hypocritical” Europe in which “a Western-Eastern hierarchy. The work, recently translated into Spanish, received the German Book Award, and the author visited San Sebastián as part of the Literaktum festival.
The European Union's high representative for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, described Europe as “a garden”, compared to most of the rest of the world, which he sees as “a jungle”. He spoke in comparative terms, but in his novel we see a particularly harsh and unequal Europe, very far from being that garden.
Europe is not a paradise. I think he's under a lot of pressure right now, especially with these two wars going on. There are many unresolved problems that arise from certain hierarchies that were established, especially after World War II, and that still persist. And I am referring especially to that East-West hierarchy. With Russia's war against Ukraine, suddenly Western Europe woke up and saw that there is something called Eastern Europe and that it also has something to say. Before it wasn't even talked about. It is an issue that remains unresolved.
The Europe of her novel is especially hard for women from the East like Adina, the protagonist.
She is a character that appeared in my second novel, but then I was a teenager living in a town in the Czech Republic. I was interested in exploring her, and she asked me: what could have happened to her in her life by the time she was 20? That was really the impetus that led me to write. Then she was in Finland, which I thought was her apartment, and I wondered what had led her to get there.
And he thought about introducing the topic of sexual violence…
Yes, because at that time I was very aware of that issue, since people I knew had told me that they had suffered abuse when they were young. She was translating Virginia Woolf, who lived a history of abuse in her family, and Lucia Berlin, who was raped by her grandfather... I thought: is this normal? I began to read and research a lot about it, and finally decided to direct the novel towards that terrain.
Thanks to this research, the work, despite being a novel, incorporates data that gives an idea of the dimension of the problem.
The writing process and the research process have been parallel. She took me eight years, but for a year I had to stop because she was angry about what she read, about the fact that one in three women has experienced a situation of abuse or about how they are treated in trials. One of the characters is a lawyer, so it made sense for her to introduce real data. They are devastating, and when people read the book they are shocked by the magnitude of the problem.
The main issue is, indeed, a case of sexual violence; However, the plot intersects with other, very political, issues that concern him. One of them is that “hierarchy between Europeans” that I mentioned and that the character of Leonides, an Estonian MEP, denounces.
I grew up in East Germany and have an accurate view of East-West relations. At first I focused on the relations between the two Germanys, which are also very hierarchical. In some ways, we can say that the East has been absorbed by West Germany. Later, when I was in Finland I looked at the relations between East and West, but on a European scale. What interests me is to highlight that there is no dialogue between two, but that Western Europe always thinks that the way it lives, does things or looks at the past is better. But that cannot always be imported into countries that have experienced a very different situation, that have experienced, in many cases, 60 years of communist regime. That marks you a lot, and Western Europe has forgotten that and has not sought a dialogue, but has simply looked down and said: “Wake up!”
The book also talks about promoting a “Nuremberg” on the Soviet experience.
When I was in Helsinki, at university, I was talking to a lot of people from the Baltic countries, people like Leonides, one of the protagonists, and you see that analyzing their own past is something they would see as important. Or judge the criminals of Stalinism, as the Germans did in Nuremberg, although you see that this is impossible and that Putin would be among them. In the current situation it is absolutely impossible to talk about it or act on it. Western Europe is more aware of this today, but it may be too late.
Do you think that in this part of Europe there is a certain romanticization or idealization of the Soviet experience? It is another question that appears in the book...
In the case of the left, without a doubt. There is a huge gap between what much of Western society saw in communism and what the people who lived through it actually suffered. That idea is also in the book, through the Estonian MEP's vision of certain demonstrations in Western Europe. It is part of that distance between Western and Eastern Europe: there are two realities based on two opposing memory regimes.
